[1340] in java-interest
Re: The Future of Java (and Sun)
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Smiljan Grmek - KSI ZGB)
Wed Aug 30 14:42:12 1995
Date: Wed, 30 Aug 1995 17:52:03 +0200 (MET DST)
From: Smiljan Grmek - KSI ZGB <sgrmek@public.srce.hr>
To: Rawn Shah <rawn@rtd.com>
cc: java-interest@java.sun.com
In-Reply-To: <199508300040.RAA14593@seagull.rtd.com>
On Tue, 29 Aug 1995, Rawn Shah wrote:
>
> Somebody at Sun has been spending far too much time with
> the GNU people. GNU produces great software, but for one it will never
> ever develop into a commercial product not just because they don't want
> to but because they won't do very well at all. Cygnus sells support for
> GNU software but how many of you buy products or services on a regular basis
> from Cygnus? What this line of thought is doing is basically saying that
> we have given up on making money off of our products and will just
> hope that a better world through very low priced software will pay all our
> salaries without problems.
>
> First of all 20m users will NOT be using a free Java wordprocessor. Even
> if they do, $20M ($1 per copy) will in no way justify the cost of dev of
> three copies. The cost of current hardware does not justify the costs of
> the development of software, much of which costs as much as the dev of
> some hardware.
>
How ungrateful! Sun is willing to spend money in order to make Java
viable thus ensuring a user base that all of us exploit using a
net-based, object-oriented, safe, *free* platform - Java & HotJava.
Of course GNU will not make money - money is made by hype and promotion.
Making a useful and stable product is what GNU does - look at GCC. The
GNU license is restrictive, so the developers can only make money by
using GCC - all other products are copylefted.
Java may help feed single developers (or a small team) by providing a
market and environment for free. Indeed, look at the scaling - an applet
of only several thousand lines of code may be extremely useful and easily
developed, maintained and documented by a single person. Without net/Java
this guy would have to push his idea to a company (difficult?) then have
it developed and integrated in some monstrous package (C compilers come in
100Mb chunks nowadays). Loss of time and money and as usual: user the loser.
An important point is: the only way to test usefulnes and appeal of an
idea realised as a program is the user response. So we need to provide
for a large number of such easily built and easily distributed applets
for users to test. Could anyone guarantee that the successful ones would
have been included in a monster - definitely no. On the other hand,
leaving *all* innovation to the academe is also a great loss to J.Q.Pub.
Smi
-
Note to Sun employees: this is an EXTERNAL mailing list!
Info: send 'help' to java-interest-request@java.sun.com
